Ad Astra
4 stars
Director: James Grey
Stars: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga 
Duration: 123 mins
Class: 12
KRS Releasing Ltd

On a recent trip to New York I vi­si­ted the city’s legendary Metropolitan Museum, which was hosting Apollo’s Muse, The Moon in the Age of Photography. This was a remarkable exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, with images, drawings and photographs featuring representations of the moon from the dawn of photography through to the present day.

Of course, among the many beautiful images was the now iconic shot picturing a rocket landing bang in the moon’s eye from pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès’ 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune.

That film was arguably the first science-fiction movie ever made, and in the 120-odd years since, cinema has given us myriad movies set in space, running the gamut from the action-adventure blockbusters of the long-running Star Wars and Star Trek franchises; to humorous films in the vein of Galaxy Quest, or the animated beauty of Wall-E, via a series of contemplative and complex stories, epitomised, of course, by visionary director Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 saga 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Closer to our time, the past half-dozen years have given space buffs a remarkable selection of space-set movies on which to feast their senses. The first two movies in the final Star Wars trilogy have gone far to erase the memory of the much-maligned middle trilogy. Furthermore, the critical and commercial successes of 2013’s Gravity, 2014’s Interstellar, and Arrival in 2016 underlined the thirst of audiences for more cerebral space-set fare.

Director/writer James Gray’s Ad Astra (meaning ‘to the stars’) has clearly been inspired by many a space film that has gone before.

Featuring a career-best performance from Brad Pitt, whose Plan B Pictures co-produces, Ad Astra fits many descriptions. It is a science fiction piece envisaging a future where mankind has not only built a station on Mars but has sent astronauts to Neptune. It is also a showcase for the heights CG can reach in creating a tangible and tantalising portrait of the farthest reaches of space.

And yet it is so much more – at its most basic, it is a profound and thought-provoking celebration of the indissoluble bond between father and son.

Role of a lifetime for a never-better Brad Pitt

Pitt is Major Roy McBride, an astronaut whose destiny was to emulate his father H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), who died 16 years earlier leading the Lima Project, a long-ago mission to Neptune to search for intelligent life and whose ship disappeared in deep space 16 years after launching.

Roy has grown up to be a man who is superb at his job, yet is emotionally distant. He is working on an antenna designed to locate alien life when a sudden power surge causes him serious injuries. The power surge is the latest in a series of disasters the authorities believe are being caused by radioactive bursts emanating from explosions… possibly from Neptune.

Officials from US intelligence theorise that Clifford may well be alive after all and somehow behind these bursts… and order Roy on a mission to discover more.

This is the role of a lifetime for a never-better Brad Pitt. He fits the role of the eminent astronaut to a tee, yet this is no heroic, bravado-filled performance, it is one that is nuanced, wholly understated and utterly complex. It is a portrait of a man who on the surface is cool and aloof, yet whose icy veneer and his mental state begin to crack as he undertakes this long, dangerous and ultimately lonely journey whose ultimate destination is unknown. It is a journey that threatens to upend everything he has known and believed about his childhood, and the anticipation commingled with feat that that evokes is palpable. It is a performance imbued with emotional honesty; one that will have the actor on many Top Ten lists come year end.

Pitt’s director Gray also deserves much of the praise. He and the brilliant cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema have created a film that drips with atmosphere in both the intimate moments and those which feature endless eyepopping shots of space. Gray does let things linger slightly at points (sometimes frustratingly so) but you can forgive the moments of self-indulgence. And it is not all navel-gazing introspection. Some unexpected, well-executed action pieces ratchet up the pace – and the tension – considerably, resulting in another worthy entry to the canon of space-set films.

Joel Kinnaman in The InformerJoel Kinnaman in The Informer

Also showing

The Informer (15): Recruited by the FBI, ex-con and former special operations soldier Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman) uses his covert skills to try and take down the General – the most powerful crime boss in New York. When a sting results in the death of an undercover cop, Pete suddenly finds himself caught in the crossfire between the mob and the FBI.

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